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What Do You Do with Unicode 8.0 on z/OS?

In my previous post I suggested that I was still thinking about reasonable use cases for Unicode 8.0 on z/OS. I’ve got some ideas now. Here are a few:

1. It will be quite some time before all Web and mobile devices will support all the glyphs in the Unicode 8.0. One useful option is to use Unicode 8.0 font support on z/OS to render a graphical representation of an unsupported glyph (such as a new emoji character) and deliver that graphical rendering to a client device. That substitution approach works beautifully in WebSphere Liberty Profile for z/OS and WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, as examples.

3. Both of the approaches above can be combined with a persistent BLOB datastore, specifically DB2 for z/OS, so that graphical representations of new characters can be generated once and persisted for better performance and throughput.